Russian Workers Fear A Nightmare At N-plant

July 20, 1997|By DAVID FILIPOV The Boston Globe

RUMYANTSEVO, Russia _ — For two weeks and more than 200 miles, they have plodded along the road to Moscow in their shimmering white radiation suits, evocative of post-apocalyptic ghosts as they pass fields dotted with haystacks, prompting farmers to drop their scythes and stare.

While the world's attention has focused on the space station Mir, the workers of the Smolensk nuclear power plant have been trying to draw attention to a technological nightmare unfolding right here on Earth.

Their grim message to the Russian government: Halt the decline in working conditions, or face a serious nuclear accident.

With its lack of money for maintenance and spare parts and with chronically late salaries, the Smolensk plant has much in common with most large factories in the debt-ridden Russian economy. But the Smolensk station also has three nuclear reactors of the same type that caused the world's worst nuclear accident 11 years ago in Chernobyl, Ukraine.

The workers said the stress of four months without pay is beginning to affect their ability to work, just as financially motivated delays in the plants' maintenance schedule are beginning to erode their confidence in the safety systems that are supposed to shut down the plant's reactors in an emergency.

``There are 21 parts that need to be replaced, but there's no money,'' said Maxim Katayev, an engineer at the Smolensk plant. ``I'm supposed to earn $300 a month, but I'm living off the pickled cucumbers my grandmother grows. We don't want to have a second Chernobyl. But it could happen and it gets more likely with every day.''

To draw attention to their plight, Katayev and several other Smolensk plant workers on July 3 set out on foot from their home in Desnogorsk, 240 miles southwest of Moscow. Only 50 protesters have walked the whole route along the congested, smog-ridden highways that links Moscow to Warsaw and Kiev; nuclear workers are forbidden to strike.

Arriving in the capital on Thursday, the protesters took their demands for increased financing to the Russian government building, joining the legions of teachers, doctors, miners, auto workers, defense industry workers and scientists who have converged here in recent months.

But unlike most protesters, the nuclear workers got an audience right away with Energy Minister Boris Nemtsov, who promised $23 million in immediate money for Russia's atomic energy industry, and vowed to earmark $51 million monthly.

Environmentalists and Western analysts cringe at the thought of nuclear power plant operators working with no pay and in poor conditions. But the issue has barely made waves in a Russia locked in a vicious circle of debt, tax evasion and stagnation.

On Thursday, President Boris Yeltsin publicly admonished Russia's nuclear energy minister for the industry's poor state of affairs. But the root of the problem appears to reside with the powerful Russian energy monopoly, United Energy Systems, which owns most of the country's nuclear power plants.

The monopoly charges its industrial customers among the highest rates in the world for energy, but residential users pay a mere pittance, a holdover from the socialist era that encourages massive waste.